Last Supper has a secret score, claims musician

IT’S a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real. An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

It raises the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a sombre composition to accompany the scene depicted in the work. “It sounds like a requiem,” said Giovanni Maria Pala. “It is like a soundtrack that emphasises the passion of Jesus.” Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan’s Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Last Supper vividly depicts Jesus’ last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion.

Mr Pala, a 45-year-old musician, began studying Leonardo’s painting in 2003, after hearing on a news programme that researchers believed the artist and inventor had hidden a musical composition in the work.

“As a musician, I wanted to dig deeper,” he said. In a new book, Mr Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues. Mr Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note. But the notes made no sense until Mr Pala realised that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo’s writing style.

In his book — La Musica Celata (The Hidden Music) — Mr Pala also describes how he found other clues that reveal the slow rhythm of the composition and the duration of each note. The result is a 40-second “hymn to God”.

A segment taken from a CD of the piece contained a Bach-like passage that was almost painfully slow but musical.

Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, said he had not seen Mr Pala’s research but the musician’s hypothesis “is plausible”.